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Monthly Archives: June 2013

This spring, the Alliance for Home Health Quality and Innovation released an electronic supplement to the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, “Optimizing Home Health Care: Enhanced Value and Improved Outcomes.” The supplement features six research articles from leading home health experts, and can be read in its entirety here. Physicians can also seek Continuing Medical Education (CME) credit online related to three of the journal articles and free of charge, by clicking here.

In a continuing effort to educate the care community on the value of home health, the Alliance is issuing a series of one-page documents for each article. The first in the series summarizes the article, “Home-based care for heart failure: Cleveland Clinic’s ‘Heart Care at Home’ transitional care program.” The article focuses on potential value for home care in treating patients with chronic heart failure (HF).

Article Highlights

Heart Care at Home, a program initiated by the Cleveland Clinic in 2010, seeks to minimize possible risks in the transition of HF patients from inpatient to home care.

As part of the program, home care liaisons visit HF patients approximately two days following discharge from the hospital into the home to teach patients how to use their telehealth equipment.

HF patients, in the Heart Care at Home program, receive weekly contact and monitoring from telehealth nurses for 30-40 days after the program begins.

Home care nurses are trained specifically to work with HF patients and telehealth technologies.

The program yielded high success in 30 day readmissions rate, which were nearly four percent lower for first-time enrollees in Heart Care at Home versus publicly reported Cleveland Clinic rates.